[Bencheng]

I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand.

1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fine tune based on specific customers data, prompt tune for particular type of elements e.g. Checkboxes, split 100s pages of PDF into dozens of documents with a few pages)

We're at around 55k MRR, the price model is per page, and we sign annual contracts with most clients (with some discounts)

2nd is an open-source CIAM [1]; Around 35k MRR.

We knew nothing about marketing when we started, so we partnered with local GCP/Azure as an ISV to get our first paying customers, which drove us to the more "Corporate" segment of the market.

A huge challenge is obviously how to market the product, but customer support for developers is tough as well -- you have to be developers to provide support for other developers, and sometimes it feels like you're troubleshooting for another dev team.

For example, one time we had a client email us saying they were getting incorrect results from our API suddenly, after many back-and-forth emails, we finally asked if we could do troubleshooting with a video call and share screen -- turns out they were interestingly calling our API via a proxy with cache enabled.

[0] https://formx.ai

[1] https://authgear.com

[its_down_again]

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

[Bencheng]

Saw some other products partners with a Cloud vendor for marketing exposure, so we look into it.

It turns out that the most effective and easy way for their sales rep to pitch your products to their client is if you have something complementary. For us, this is because they have similar products, so they can propose it to the client if they don't like the native one.

[nopcode]

cloud reps get commission for services sold via their marketplace. Often they even have a bigger financial incentive to sell third party products over native GCP/Azure stuff.